The inventive concept relates to non-volatile memory systems, and more particularly, to memory controllers, non-volatile memory systems, and related operating methods capable of performing garbage collection operations.
Memory systems, for example, flash memory systems are widely used as non-volatile memory devices in universal serial bus (USB) drives, digital cameras, mobile phones, smart phones, tablet personal computers (PCs), memory cards, and solid state drives (SSDs). In a flash memory device, a write/read unit and an erase unit may be different from each other and thus a memory operation may be managed by a flash translation layer (FTL) that may include firmware.
In a flash memory system, data may be written to an erased block (e.g., a free block) and a garbage collection operation may be performed to secure one or more free blocks. Since data is transferred or moved during a garbage collection operation, address mapping information associated with the data being moved may be frequently updated. Alternately or additionally, metadata (e.g., mapping information) associated with data moved during a garbage collection operation may be frequently updated. Frequent and/or repeated update of data and corresponding metadata may increase latency period(s) related to garbage collection, and/or shorten the effective lifetime of memory cells in the memory system.